What We Believed

Transformed by Truth, by
Joseph Tkach
Chapter 7

A lifelong evangelical who recently has
become my friend told me a story that highlights the extensive doctrinal and
theological changes we’ve been making the last several years in the Worldwide
Church of God. My friend was sitting in a waiting room a few months ago when he
noticed a copy of The PIain Truth lying on a table. He was acquainted
with the magazine and knew of many of our former doctrinal aberrations. Out of
curiosity he picked up the magazine. As he skimmed article after article, he
became increasingly alarmed. What made him so anxious?

"I thought I was losing my
theological discernment," he explained. "I had heard nothing of the
changes taking place within the Worldwide Church of God, and I was startled—no,
worried—that I couldn’t find anything doctrinally wrong with the articles I
was reading. I thought, What’s wrong with me? This stuff sounds like it’s
straight out of an evangelical publication. What am I missing? Why can’t I spot
the errors? Am I losing it?"

His alarm melted away only when another
friend explained that the WCG had undergone monumental theological reformation
in the past several years. My friend could hardly believe it. Had the church really
moved away from the aberrant and even heretical doctrinal positions that had
marked it for so many years? Yes, he was told, it really had done so. All he
could do was shake his head.

The Protestant Connection

I think my friend would have shaken his
head even more vigorously had he known that nearly all of the doctrinal
distinctives that Herbert Armstrong taught originated not with him, but with Protestant
groups (albeit extreme and even heretical ones).

Mr. Armstrong was nothing in his
theological approach if not eclectic. He borrowed and adapted most of his
"unique" teachings from others. Often when we try to tell some of our
people that Mr. Armstrong borrowed much of his teaching from outside sources, we
meet heavy resistance. So we sometimes respond with the following: "Allow
us to lay out a challenge aimed at combating the idea that these doctrines were
specially revealed to Herbert Armstrong. We want to show that they really did
not pour directly from the Godhead into his mind. Here’s our challenge: You
know the distinctive teachings of Herbert Armstrong; now you name the teaching
and we’ll tell you where it came from. We’ll show you what preceded Herbert
Armstrong and demonstrate that the teaching was not specially revealed to
him and it wasn’t restored from the first century."

When someone takes us up on this
challenge, almost always the first doctrine to be mentioned is the Sabbath. "Sorry!"
I say "The Seventh-day Baptists had that first, long before Mr.
Armstrong." You should see the looks on people’s faces as we start naming
the origins of one doctrine after another.

How about the nature of man? Sorry—the
evangelist Charles Finney heavily influenced our former ideas on that. In fact,
after Mr. Armstrong’s death when my dad moved into his predecessor’s office
and cleaned out his desk, guess what book he found there explaining the nature
of man? You guessed it—a work by Charles Finney

Well, what about Anglo-Israelism?
Certainly that one was specially revealed to Mr. Armstrong! Well, not exactly. A
man named John Sadler apparently pioneered the idea way back in 1649, while
another man named Richard Brothers (1757-1824) developed the concept further. It’s
true Mr. Armstrong took their ideas and adapted them in a peculiar way, but he
emphatically did not originate the concept. In fact, it is no secret that
Herbert Armstrong’s The United States andthe British Commonwealth
in Prophecy was copied from a book titled Judah’s Scepter and Joseph’s
Birthright1by J. H. Allen.

It is possible to run down almost the
entire list of "new truths" supposedly revealed to Mr. Armstrong and
point out where he got them and what preceded them. And most interesting of all
(at least for me) is that most of these teachings he learned from Protestants.
Contrary to what we formerly believed, none of our distinctive doctrines was
specially revealed to Mr. Armstrong-at least not in the way the term
"specially revealed" is commonly understood. And therein lies another
story.

A Story: More Than a Grain
of Truth

A story which cannot be documented
nevertheless gives an accurate understanding of how Mr. Armstrong used the term revealed.
Before Mr. Armstrong moved to California, he and John Kiesz, a former Church
of God (Seventh Day) minister who is now deceased, were working together in
Eugene, Oregon. Mr. Armstrong was putting out initial copies of
The PIain
Truth and had started his radio broadcast. The men were sharing an office,
and John Kiesz came in one day to find Mr. Armstrong pounding away on the
typewriter.

"Herbert, what are you doing?"
Mr. Kiesz asked.

"John," Mr. Armstrong replied,
"God has revealed this incredible new truth to me." You must
understand that in our former system, "new truth" was the ultimate
find. When my parents first joined the church back in the fifties, I remember my
mom and dad being asked one question repeatedly. The question wasn’t,
"How did you come to join the Worldwide Church of God?" but "When
did you come into The Truth?" Not "When did you accept
Christ?" but "When did you come into The Truth?" For us,
new truth was the pearl of great price.

Back to the story. As John Kiesz peered
over Mr. Armstrong’s shoulder and looked at the article being typed, he
recognized it. "Herbert," he said, "this appeared in The Bible
Advocate [the Church of God (Seventh Day) magazine] about three months
ago."

This story, told to me by Mr. Kiesz
himself, illustrates the fact that Mr. Armstrong used the term revealed in
a way substantially different from how one might see it defined in most
dictionaries or seminary textbooks. When he said something had been revealed to
him, he did not mean that God had poured the new understanding directly into his
waiting mind. No, whatever the new teaching happened to be, it usually came
through a more human channel.

When some people hear this for the first
time, they wrongly assume that Mr. Armstrong knowingly talked about "new
revelation" in a deceitfully malicious way. When he’d talk about ideas
being revealed to him, most people automatically assumed he meant revealed in
the sense of Paul’s experience on the Damascus road or Isaiah’s experience
when he was called into ministry as described in Isaiah 6. But this would be to
misunderstand. Mr. Armstrong’s use of the term revealed was a good deal
more elastic than that, and I don’t believe it was deliberately deceitful or
malicious. Yet it did create a picture for people that God was somehow directly
communicating new ideas and teachings to Mr. Armstrong through some kind of
divine pipeline. That, of course, created all kinds of problems.

A Stroll Through Past
Headlines

When people sincerely believe that their
spiritual leader has the ultimate inside track on divine wisdom, they cannot
help but sit up and take notice when he speaks—especially if what he says
concerns their eternal welfare or destruction. Imagine for a moment that you
were convinced your own pastor had a direct line from God, that what he said was
the absolute truth, and that when he spoke, you had better listen and take heed.
Imagine also that he made most of his pronouncements through a church
newsletter. What would you think when you saw headlines like the following,
knowing that they were directed to you from your undisputed spiritual leader?

HOW YOU DRESS FOR CHURCH—
Could it keep you out of the KINGDOM?2

How subtly Satan used MAKEUP to start
the Church off the track3

OUR LIGHT IS SHINING!—and not the
cosmetics on our faces4

My guess is you’d probably respond a lot
like we did—with firm dedication laced with fear. Our spiritual lives were
heavy with rules and threats. Most of us began to measure ourselves more by what
we didn’t do than by what we did. As our rule books grew thick, our concept of
grace grew correspondingly thin. We did not so much have a vital relationship
with Christ as we had a cognitive acceptance of certain esoteric doctrines. Who
you knew wasn’t nearly so important as what you knew. Doctrine—new truth—was
everything to us. It’s what set us apart from everyone else. And my, did it
set us apart!

Seven Key Doctrinal
Emphases

For those who may not be familiar with
what the Worldwide Church of God formerly taught, allow me to briefly sketch out
seven areas of doctrine that, taken together, set us apart from all other
organizations, denominations, and churches. Our former doctrinal distinctives
cannot be limited to the following, but in my opinion what follows represents
the chief teachings that defined us as a group and distinguished us from all
others. Please remember: The Worldwide Church of God no longer holds to,
teaches, or defends any of these doctrines. What I am about to describe is the
former doctrinal edifice of the Worldwide Church of God. In large part, the
following description will apply to the vast majority of our splinter groups.
(For a brief comparison of what the church formerly taught with what it teaches
today, see the appendix.)

1. Who Is God?

While the Worldwide Church of God has
always taught that God was eternal, immutable, and sovereign, it also used to
teach that He was constantly learning and growing. We taught that God the Father
had a human form, as we do. Consider this:

Now notice once again Genesis 1:26:
"...God (Elohim) said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness
[form and shape]..." God is described in the Bible as having eyes, ears,
nose, mouth—hair on his head—arms, legs, fingers, toes. Jesus was
"...the express image of his [the Father’s] Person..." (Hebrews
1:3).5

From this passage you see that our God was
not entirely orthodox. He had eyes, ears, nose, mouth—all the bodily parts we
have. On the one hand, we were right in saying the Bible used these words to
describe Him; the Psalms, for example, are full of such terms in reference to
God. On the other hand, we can now see, by God’s grace, that these terms are
used anthropomorphically, to picture God in a poetic way. I think we understood
this principle a little even then, for we never did take all such terms
literally. We never taught, for example, that God had feathers, as a woodenly
literal reading of Psalm 17:8 would require, nor that He sometimes acted like a
drunk, as Psalm 78:65 would suggest. That was too literal even for us.

Our heretical concept of God did not stop
there. We vigorously denied the Trinity, claiming that it was a pagan doctrine.
Although we upheld the deity of Christ, we understood Him to be a separate God
from the Father; while we said He had always existed with God Almighty, we also
taught He did not become the Son of God until He was born into the world through
the virgin Mary. And the Holy Spirit? We denied His personality and taught that
"He" was really an "it," as the following passage shows:

If the Holy Spirit is not a Person—a
Ghost—then what does the Bible reveal about the Holy Spirit?... The Holy
Spirit is the Spirit (not Ghost) that emanates out from both God and Christ
everywhere in the universe. Through His Holy Spirit, God projects Himself, in
Spirit, everywhere in the universe—yet both God and Christ have form and
shape, even as man.

The Holy Spirit is many things. It is
the VERY LIFE of the immortal God, which, entering in a human, begets him with
GOD-life.

It is the POWER of God, by which, when
Christ "spake" it was done. It is the POWER by which God stretched
out the heavens—created the vast endless universe.

The Holy Spirit, entering into man as
God’s gift, opens the mind to UNDERSTANDING of spiritual knowledge, unknown
to the human mind otherwise. It is the LOVE of God "...shed abroad in our
hearts..." (Romans 5:5). It is the FAITH of Christ, which may be given to
God’s begotten children through the Holy Spirit. It is the POWER of God,
begotten within humans, enabling us to overcome Satan and sin.6

We taught that the primary mission of
Jesus was to prove that the law could be kept. We said that the Holy Spirit came
to the believer to implant the life and character of Jesus. In that way we were
able to obey the commandments of God.

Finally, we taught that the destiny of all
true believers (that is, members in good standing of the WCG) was to become God
even as God is God. We said that we would become part of a "God
family." The quest of every believer was to become God even as He is God.
This is one reason we so vigorously attacked the doctrine of the Trinity. In our
minds, the Trinity limited God to three Persons—hardly an acceptable teaching
when you insisted that every believer’s destiny was to become a literal God in
the God family. We put it like this:

Emperor Constantine of the Roman Empire
government called the Nicene Council in A.D. 325 and made both, the pagan
Easter (from the goddess Astarte) and the Trinity doctrine, LAW!... The
Trinity doctrine limited God to three Persons.7

These days, of course, we have admitted
our error and have embraced the biblical and orthodox doctrine of the Trinity:
one God existing eternally as three coequal, divine Persons. We believe that God
is spirit and therefore does not have bodily parts as we do, and that Jesus’
primary mission was to seek and to save that which was lost (we humans!). The
Holy Spirit does empower us to live godly lives but not as a mere
"force" or "energy."

2. Who Is Man?

While we thought that true believers would
be resurrected to eternal life, we taught that unbelievers remained dead for one
thousand years longer. This would have major implications for our teaching on
the afterlife.

We taught that God was literally
reproducing Himself through mankind. Our destiny was not to remain merely human,
but to become God—born again as members of God’s family just as human
children are fully human, so (we thought) God’s children will be fully God.

Today we recognize that our destiny is not
to become God; He is forever separate, holy, and blessed, the blessed and only
Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives
in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:15–16).
He alone is uncreated; we are His creation, brought into existence by His
creative power. He is without beginning or ending. We humans have a beginning.
The redeemed will one day be glorified and receive indestructible bodies like
that of the Lord Jesus after His resurrection, but we will never become God.
That is impossible.

3. What Is Salvation?

We used to teach that no one was
"born again" until the final resurrection. We said that those who
believed in the death and resurrection of Jesus and who committed themselves to
obeying the law were "begotten" (which we understood to mean
"conceived") sons of God and would be "born again" at the
time of the resurrection. Until then, a believer was only conceived, not born.
Therefore, no one was "saved" in their earthly life; they had to await
the return of Jesus Christ for that. At the resurrection the believer would be
raised up and finally be born again. "We are begotten sons of God if we
have the Holy Spirit. And therefore, we are impregnated with immortal life, to
have it when Christ comes, which will be in the Family of God."8

This was one of the few doctrines taught
by Mr. Armstrong that has no known precedent; it appears to be unique to him. He
developed this teaching through a simple misunderstanding of the original Greek
text underlying the New Testament. He erroneously claimed that the Greek word gennao
("beget," KJV) was the only word used for this activity in the New
Testament. Yet at least three other terms—apokueo, anagennao, tikto—are
used interchangeably with gennao and can be translated
"conceive," "bring forth," "deliver," etc. Experts
in the Greek language—as well as a properly utilized lexicon—can easily
point out the correct understanding of this term. First Peter 1:23 makes it
clear that our former understanding was in error: "For you have been born
again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and
enduring word of God" (emphasis mine).

We also claimed that while Christ died for
the sins of the world, believing in Christ was insufficient to gain salvation;
the believer must also obey Christ. That obedience, as we formerly understood
it, included adherence to the Saturday Sabbath, to dietary laws (as in Leviticus
11), and observance of religious festivals, new moons, and holy days. We taught
that only those who obeyed all the commandments—including those portions of
the Old Covenant law that Herbert Armstrong believed and taught to "still
be in effect"—could achieve salvation. In other words, while salvation
was a gift, one had to qualify to receive this free gift. Adam had to qualify to
restore the government of God on earth; he failed. Christ had to qualify by
overcoming Satan and proving loyal to God and God’s way; He succeeded. In the
same way, each one in the church also had to "qualify" in order to sit
on Christ’s throne with Him. It was a sort of conditional grace, which helps
to explain how Mr. Armstrong could make such statements as, "Jesus Christ
does not make it EASY for any of us whom God calls and Jesus uses in His service—or
those called for salvation. To qualify for the free GIFT of salvation is not
easy."9 Today we teach that people are born again the moment they put their
trust in the living Savior, Jesus Christ. Salvation is a gift and cannot be
earned or "qualified for" in any way: "For it is by grace you
have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of
God—not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:8).

4. What Is the Church?

We were adamant that God had only one true
church in the world, and we were it. All others were false and apostate. We
labeled Roman Catholicism "the Great Whore of Babylon" (from
Revelation 17) and called Protestants her harlot daughters.

Herbert Armstrong also claimed that the
true gospel ceased to be preached from about A.D. 53 when it was squelched by
the Great Whore. The truth reappeared nineteen centuries later under the
leadership of Mr. Armstrong. He was Christ’s apostle in the last days who
would restore lost truth to the church in order to prepare for Christ’s
imminent Second Coming.

How did we know we were the "only
true church"? For one thing, we had the "correct" name, "the
church of God." We were known as the "Radio Church of God," until
1968 when we changed our name to the Worldwide Church of God. Second, we
observed God’s Sabbath, along with the Old Covenant dietary laws and special
feast days. We required the celebration of seven annual Sabbaths (Leviticus 23)—one
of which lasted for eight days—and avoided pork, shrimp, and certain other
meats. The WCG interpreted the Bible to discourage members from voting, to
prohibit righteous people from serving in the military, marrying after being
divorced, relying on doctors (for anything other than accidents, "repair
surgery" or childcare), using cosmetics, or observing Christmas, Easter,
and birthdays. No other church followed all these strict practices; therefore,
they were apostate and we were righteous.

Because this was true, we distanced
ourselves from every other "Christian falsely so-called" and all other
denominations. We became isolated and set apart. Information about the time and
location of services was carefully guarded. Prospective members were carefully
screened and invited to services only when they "were almost ready for
baptism."10 We saw ourselves as God’s only true church and we didn’t
hide our belief. A headline from a Good News published on December
18, 1978, blares, "THE WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD TODAY" and is
subheaded, "the only voice in the wilderness of today’s religious Babylon
giving a hopeless world its ONLY and SURE HOPE!""

And what of the organization of God’s
one true church? In the beginning, we were organized in a largely democratic
fashion. In a six-thousand-word article written in 1939 and titled "Did
Christ Reorganize the Church?" Herbert Armstrong thoroughly condemned
centralized, hierarchical church government, and enthusiastically supported
congregational autonomy. He wrote, "All authority and power to rule is
limited solely to each LOCAL congregation. But there is NO BIBLE AUTHORITY for
any super-government, or organization with authority over the local
congregations!" He blamed Emperor Constantine for instituting a
hierarchical system, as he had blamed him for introducing the doctrine of the
Trinity.

Yet over time the WCG itself would
institute a rigid hierarchical system. On January 22, 1955, Mr. Armstrong said
that "for the first time in 750 years God’s complete government is
restored to His Church." On that day, he said, every administrative office
mentioned in Scripture had been recognized and filled in the Radio Church of God—apostle,
evangelist, pastor, minister—elder (preaching elder), deacon, and deaconess.
By the midfifties it could be said that "the congregations are ruled by the
elders, who are ruled by the evangelists, and they are ruled by the apostle who
is ruled by Christ who is ruled by God. All offices are appointed, by a superior
office. It is government from God down to each individual member of the
church."12

Other things would change in "God’s
church," as well. Mr. Armstrong was not always called "Christ’s
apostle." But by the early 1950s some students at Ambassador began to refer
to him that way. Soon others picked it up. The first time he was publicly called
an apostle was in 1951 at a Feast of Tabernacles, when Herman Hoeh, one of the
first graduates of Ambassador College and ministers of the church, used the
title in a sermon. Mr. Armstrong later wrote, "At that time his words hit
my startled ears like an atomic bomb and my first impulse was to deny and
correct his statement immediately."13 In 1955 he acknowledged the truth of
this title, but he rarely used it or even mentioned it for the next twenty
years. When he did use it, he would call himself "the one you [ministers
and others] call an apostle." By the seventies he had begun to use the term
frequently, and in the last decade of his life he often called himself "the
sole apostle of the twentieth century."

Today we reject what is well known as
"Armstrongism," that is, adherence to the teachings of Herbert W.
Armstrong in lieu of biblical evidence to the contrary. We have accepted the
primacy of the Bible and of the gospel, while more than one hundred splinter
groups that the WCG spawned continue to teach and proclaim the unbiblical
interpretations of a man. We do not believe the WCG is God’s only true church;
we know there are genuine believers in all Christian denominations. We do not
believe that one form of church government is more biblical than another and are
taking steps to decentralize our ecclesiastical structure. God’s church has
continued to thrive through all of the centuries since Jesus rose from the grave
two millennia ago; we are simply one small part of the Bride of Christ. And we
are happy to be so!

5. How Should We Handle the Old Covenant?

This question shaped a multitude of
beliefs and practices in our church. The New Covenant/Old Covenant debate is a
significant piece of the puzzle because a mixed understanding of this existed in
our church for a long time. Many people thought we were still under the Old
Covenant, primarily because many of our ministers were teaching exactly that.

I remember Ted Armstrong giving a sermon
in Pasadena about this topic. He asked the audience, "How many people here
think we’re under the New Covenant? Raise your hand." Scores of hands
went up. Then he asked, "And how many people think we’re under the Old
Covenant? Raise your hand." More hands went up. Then he said, "By the
time I’m done this morning, you’ll know what kind of a church we are."

Then he took us on a tour of scores of
verses, highlighting the word commandments wherever it appeared (out of context,
of course, but we were all ignorant of that). His concluding verse was Hebrews
8:13, which says, "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first
old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away" (KJV).
He fixed on that final phrase and said, "See, it hasn’t yet vanished
away. It waxeth old, but it’s still in force; it hasn’t vanished."

As we sat there listening to him deliver
this sermon, we were biblically ignorant. We had no idea that the Book of
Hebrews was written just a few years before the destruction of the Jewish temple
in A.D. 70. When the invading Roman army razed the temple and burned Jerusalem
to the ground, the old mode of relating to God was certainly done away with,
forever. The Roman legions of Titus saw to it that the Old Covenant system
"vanished" once and for all. Yet almost two thousand years after those
events had occurred, we remained firmly convinced by Ted’s presentation that
we were still under the Old Covenant.

Even so, the question didn’t stay
settled for long. Troubling objections continued to be raised. How could we
still be under the Old Covenant when we never made any of the animal sacrifices
that were at the heart of that covenant? And how could we say that Christ did
away with that aspect of the covenant, but the rest of it was still intact and
in force? How did one decide which portions of the Old Covenant still applied
and which ones didn’t?

In 1978 Herbert Armstrong wrote an article
intended to clear up the confusion.14 He wrote that while it was correct to say
we were no longer under the Old Covenant, yet we were not yet under the New
Covenant either; that wouldn’t begin until Christ returned. So where were we?
We were "between" the two covenants.

Such a pronouncement gave Mr. Armstrong a
platform from which to pick and choose which items from the Old Covenant and
which items from the New would apply to us. It explains how we could be required
to observe Old Covenant holy days but not be required to make animal sacrifices
for sin. Whatever we were commanded to obey, however, we were commanded to obey
in no uncertain terms.

By God’s grace, we have left all this
behind. We are not an Old Covenant church, but a New Covenant church. We do not
earn our standing before God by doing anything (although what we do certainly
reveals what is in our heart). We live by grace, not by law; by the New
Covenant, not the Old.

6. What Is a True View of History?

One of Mr. Armstrong’s chief teachings
was his own version of British-Israelism. He taught that the Anglo-Saxons (the
British peoples) are direct descendants of the ten "lost" tribes of
Israel. He said the ten tribes of Israel migrated to northwestern Europe and are
to be found today primarily in England and the English-speaking world. The
Anglo-Saxons of England and the United States, he said, are the descendants of
Ephraim and Manasseh.

How did he come to this conclusion?
Tortured etymology gives one answer. For example, he said that the Hebrew word
for "covenant" (berith) became significant in English when
combined with the Hebrew word for "man" (ish). Since vowels are
not written in the Masoretic text of the original Hebrew text, the e in
berith drops out to form the term brith. Since ancient Hebrews did not
pronounce the h, berith became brit. Put that together with ish
and you have "British." Of course, there are no biblical or
historical reasons to make such leaps in logic.

He did something similar with the term
"Saxon." Genesis 21:12 tells us that God promised to bless Isaac’s
seed. If the I in Isaac is dropped, we are left with saac—and it
is "Saac’s sons" (Saxon) with whom God’s covenant was
established. Therefore when Jesus said He had been sent only to "the lost
sheep of Israel," He meant He had come to deliver His message not to the
Jews, but to the Anglo-Saxon people. Mr. Armstrong wrote, "Jesus had told
His disciples to go NOT to the gentiles, but to the ‘lost sheep of the House
of Israel.’ The ‘House of Israel’ never refers to the Jews—always
to the kingdom that became known as ‘the lost ten tribes.’ They were in
Western Europe and Britain when Jesus gave this instruction."15 Earlier he
had insisted: "So here is another TRUTH unknown in the teachings of most
churches called Christianity—Israel was divided into TWO nations—and the
people of the kingdom of Israel were NOT Jews, nor are they ever called
Jews in the Bible!"16

At other times he would claim that the
current English throne is an extension of the throne of David and that the Stone
of Scone, which used to lie beneath the royal English throne, is actually the
very rock Jacob used for a pillow as described in Genesis 28:11. Mr. Armstrong
claimed the stone had been transported by the prophet Jeremiah to the British
Isles (yet geologists say the stone is calcareous, a type common to Scotland,
and is inconsistent with rocks from the area of Isarel). In many ways this doctrine of
British-Israelism shaped our major beliefs and practices.

Beyond British-Israelism, we were taught
false church history. It was commonly maintained, for example, that the man
often referred to as Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-25) started the Roman Catholic Church—a
claim which is simply wrong. Such false history shaped much of what we did and
taught.

Sometimes we would be directed to a
diagram of church history. It would indicate the beginning of the church at
Pentecost at one end of the diagram and where we were in the twentieth century.
In between was little good. The gospel had ceased to be proclaimed in A.D. 53; a
little while later the "church" abandoned the Sabbath and replaced it
with Sunday-keeping. This is where the church got off track.

So according to the diagram, the church
started well, then almost immediately got on a descending line until finally it
was corrupt. Still, the church never completely lost sight of all the truth.
Through time a number of remnant people—the Waldensians, the Bogomils, the
Lollards—were persecuted by the Great Whore. We preached and taught that these
people were true Christians. Why? Regardless of what else they may have believed
or practiced, they were true Christians because they had the "Sabbath
truth."

It’s interesting for us today to look at
some of these groups honestly. Many of them were gnostics and deists.
Waldensians were Trinitarians and were not Sabbath keepers; they kept Sunday as
their Sabbath. But because they used the word "Sabbath" in their
writings, we mistakenly assumed they worshiped on Saturday. At some point a few
Waldensians did break off from the main group and started keeping Saturday as
the Sabbath, but the majority of the church never did so.

We absolutely accepted this deeply flawed
version of history. In truth, there’s something appealing even to the
Protestant mind about such a view of history. We know the Roman Church did
wander off track through its medieval teachings of indulgences and its general
corruption. We know that Martin Luther did a great thing by igniting the flame
of the Reformation. There’s something good about such a view of history—but
there’s something troubling about it, too, even beyond the wild inaccuracies.
We saw conspiracy everywhere, a parallel track of good and evil. The groups that
"had the Sabbath truth" (or the ones we thought had the Sabbath) were
good; the others were corrupt because they didn’t have the Sabbath. Everything
for us was colored by this skewed view of history.

7. What Does the Future Hold?

In our former view, all of history looked
to the millennium as the pinnacle of righteousness and godliness. Christ would
come back to set up His government and reign for a thousand years, and we would
be His partners. All that He did on earth at His first advent—His sinless
life, His sacrificial death, and His resurrection from the grave—were nothing
but preliminaries to the kingdom. He came not so much to save us from our sins
(although He did that) as to proclaim and lay the groundwork for the coming
kingdom of God.

At the resurrection and the beginning of
the millennium, dead believers would be resurrected and born again to reign with
Christ on the earth. As Herbert Armstrong wrote: "The KINGDOM OF GOD is a
literal GOVERNMENT. Even as the Chaldean Empire was a KINGDOM—even as the
Roman Empire was a KINGDOM—so the KINGDOM OF GOD is a government. It is to
take over the GOVERNMENT of the NATIONS of the world."17

And when would this cataclysmic event
happen? Mr. Armstrong taught that it could happen at any time and offered many
predictions about its timing (all of which failed to come true). He said that
the Worldwide Church of God would first be miraculously transported to a place
of safety, probably Petra—an ancient, walled city in the south of Jordan, a
place of protection against the terrors of Armageddon—in 1936. He later
mistakenly predicted that this event would occur in ’43 and then again in ’72.
Three and a half years after the church was taken to safety, Christ would return
and the battle of Armageddon would commence. When all these predictions failed
and numbers of people left the church in response, he became much more careful
about setting prophetic dates.

Finally, we taught there were three
separate resurrections:

1. Members of the true church, as
well as departed saints, would be raised to life to meet the returning
Christ and establish the millennial kingdom. At that time they would be
born again and become literal Gods in the "God Family."

2. Those who had not heard "the
Truth" in their lifetime would be resurrected at the end of the
millennium, at which time the saints would teach them correct doctrine. If
they refused to accept it, there was only one fate.

3. Willful sinners were to be
resurrected from the dead, only to be thrown into the lake of fire, where
they would perish and cease to exist for eternity.

Today we no longer hold this
three-resurrection eschatological scheme to be a test of fellowship. We
recognize that true Christians can and do differ on their views of future
things; this does not make them less Christian or spiritually inferior. Our
members vary in their beliefs about eschatological details. But we all believe
that Christ will return one day in power and great glory and that "he must
reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be
destroyed is death" (1 Corinthians 15:25-26). We believe God to be fair,
just, and merciful. We look forward to spending eternity with Christ and all the
saints, not as fellow-Gods, but as glorified children of God—redeemed men and
women who love Him and will worship Him forever.

A Master Salesman

As I mentioned in the last chapter, before
Mr. Armstrong entered the ministry, he was an advertising man and salesman. He
did a wonderful job in those roles; many experts called him one of the great
copywriters of the twentieth century, and we admire him for that.

Unfortunately, he brought that sales
mentality into the founding of our church. It appears that he said to himself,
"All right, I’ve got to make this church different. How do I make people
want to come to this church and not some other church?"

Many of our members still ask this
question sixty years later: "How are we different anymore? In the old days
we always were different. What sets us apart today?" One of Herbert
Armstrong’s greatest successes was in making us different; we thought nobody
else had the Truth but us.

Think of it like this. Suppose you start
to market a new brand of soap. So you say to yourself, "OK, I’m selling
soap. I’ve got to distinguish my soap from Tide and from Ivory and from all
the others. So what do I do?

"For one, I can start positioning my
product by identifying all others as inferior or even worthless, as misleading,
as spurious and even hurtful. Of course, I will have to use basically the same
ingredients for my soap that they do in theirs, but I will change the name of
those ingredients. It’ll be basically the same thing, but I’ll give it a
slightly different name."

I don’t think that this really went
though Mr. Armstrong’s head, but in fact it is what happened. We were told
that we were the "only true" soap. So when we started admitting a few
years ago that we weren’t the only true soap, that others had been making
excellent soap for centuries, what do you think some of our people did? Many of
them left. But where could they go? They would never use the mainline soap. They
would never become an evangelical Christian—why, that soap was falsely
so-called, it was heretical, it was bogus. So what could they do? In their
disillusionment many of them started spinning off to splinter groups.

The Emergence of Splinter Groups

We started making doctrinal changes in
1987, but a number of splits occurred before that—thirty-four, actually.
Fourteen of those thirty-four are splits of splits. The names of these groups
are revealing: The Plainer Truth; the Mystery Church of God; the Mystery of the
Kingdom Ministry; and my all-time favorite, the New Moon, the Church of God in
the Netherlands.

Many of these groups are still meeting,
although the numbers in each are small. Some have rather tragic stories. A year
after The Family Church of God began, for example, the leader and his wife
divorced. Our largest splinter group, the United Church of God, formed shortly
after my dad gave the 1994 Christmas Eve sermon (see chapter 7). It has about
eighteen thousand members. The Global Church of God counts about seven thousand
members and is led by one of Mr. Armstrong’s first students, Roderick
Meredith. [who now leads many of the same people under a different church name]
The Church of God, Philadelphia era, is the oldest of these major splits and has
about three thousand members.

A minority of our former members—it
would be hard to assign a number—have joined other Christian denominations.
These people may have felt the WCG congregation they were attending wasn’t
making changes fast enough. Or they may have been dissatisfied with their
pastor. Or perhaps they had significant numbers of family members in other
denominations. Others simply have found that their local WCG congregation was
not equipped for fully serving the needs of all members, in light of the many
changes we made. They felt they needed to go elsewhere in the Body of Christ to
find help and healing. We are not happy to lose those people, but we are glad
they’re joining a healthy, Bible-believing, authentic church.

So after all the doctrinal changes of the
past few years, here’s where we stand: Close to seventy thousand people remain
with us, which means that we have lost about seventy thousand members. Only
thirty thousand people, perhaps less than that, attend the splinter groups. A
larger group of forty thousand people sit at home, confused, frustrated, and not
knowing what to do or what to believe. So they go nowhere; they’re dropping
out of everything.

My earnest hope is that all will be led by
the Spirit of God to embrace the real gospel of the Living Savior and will find
the abundant life He promises to give. That abundant life doesn’t come in
accepting a bushelful of esoteric doctrine but in coming humbly to the Author of
Life Himself, Jesus Christ. He and no other is the center and focus of the
gospel. I cannot end this chapter any better than with the words of the apostle
John at the close of the final book in the New Testament: "The Spirit and
the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is
thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the
water of life" (Revelation 22:17).

Endnotes

1. There is no copyright on Herbert W.
Armstrong’s first edition of The United States and the British Commonwealth
in Prophecy, probably because it is so similar to J. H. Allen’s book.

2. The Worldwide News, May 21,
1979, 1.

3. The Worldwide News, November 16,
1981, 1.

4. The Worldwide News, December 28,
1981, 1.

5. Herbert W. Armstrong, The Good News,
November 20, 1978, 5.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 4.

8. Armstrong, "CONGRESS OF LEADING
MINISTERS," 10.

9. Herbert W. Armstrong, "Just What
Is the Work?" The Worldwide News, June 30, 1980, 1.

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